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Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can't find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.

Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren't giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.

But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.

With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

Bad for Companies, Bad for Economy

ENLARGE

Andrea Levy

In other words, to get a job, you have to have that job already. It's a Catch-22 situation for workers—and it's hurting companies and the economy.

To get America's job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation's education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.

There are plenty of ways to get workers up to speed without investing too much time and money, such as putting new employees on extended probationary periods and relying more on internal hires, who know the ropes better than outsiders would.

It's a fundamental change from business as usual. But the way we're doing things now just isn't working.

The Big Myths

The perceptions about a lack of skilled workers are pervasive. The staffing company ManpowerGroup, for instance, reports that 52% of U.S. employers surveyed say they have difficulty filling positions because of talent shortages.

But the problem is an illusion.

Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can't get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That's an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn't say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.

ENLARGE

The real problem, then, is more appropriately an inflexibility problem. Finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can't be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.

Only about 10% of the people in IT jobs during the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s, for example, had IT-related degrees. While it might be great to have a Ph.D. graduate read your electrical meter, almost anyone with a little training could do the job pretty well.

A Training Shortage

And make no mistake: There are plenty of people out there who could step into jobs with just a bit of training—even recent graduates who don't have much job experience. Despite employers' complaints about the education system, college students are pursuing more vocationally oriented course work than ever before, with degrees in highly specialized fields like pharmaceutical marketing and retail logistics.

Unfortunately, American companies don't seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Much of that includes what vendors do when they bring in new equipment: "Here's how to work this copier."

The shortage of opportunities to learn on the job helps explain the phenomenon of people queueing up for unpaid internships, in some cases even paying to get access to a situation where they can work free to get access to valuable on-the-job experience.

Companies in other countries do things differently. In Europe, for instance, training is often mandated, and apprenticeships and other programs that help provide work experience are part of the infrastructure.

The result: European countries aren't having skill-shortage complaints at the same level as in the U.S., and the nations that have the most established apprenticeship programs—the Scandinavian nations, Germany and Switzerland—have low unemployment.

Employers here at home rightly point to a significant constraint that they face in training workers: They train them and make the investment, but then someone else offers them more money and hires them away.

The Way Forward

That is a real problem. What's the answer?

We aren't going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide. We're also not going to go back to the lifetime-employment models that made years-long training programs possible.

ENLARGE

But I'm also convinced that some of the problem we're up against is simply a failure of imagination. Here are three ways in which employees can get the skills they need without the employer having to invest in a lot of upfront training.

Work with education providers: If job candidates don't have the skills you need, make them go to school before you hire them.

Community colleges in many states, especially North Carolina, have proved to be good partners with employers by tailoring very applied course work to the specific needs of the employer. Candidates qualify to be hired once they complete the courses—which they pay for themselves, at least in part. For instance, a manufacturer might require that prospective job candidates first pass a course on quality control or using certain machine tools.

Going back to school isn't just for new hires, either; it also works for internal candidates. In this setup, the employer pays the tuition costs through tuition reimbursement. But the employees make the bigger investment by spending their own time, almost always off work, learning the material.

Bring back aspects of apprenticeship: In this arrangement, apprentices are paid less while they are mastering their craft—so employers aren't paying for training and a big salary at the same time. Accounting firms, law firms and professional-services firms have long operated this way, and have made lots of money off their young associates.

Of course, a full apprenticeship model—with testing and credentials associated with different stages of experience—wouldn't work in all industries. But a simpler setup would: Companies could give their new workers a longer probationary period—with lower pay—until they get up to speed on the requirements of the job.

Promote from within: Employees have useful knowledge that no outsider could have and should make great candidates for filling jobs higher up. In recent years, however, an incredible two-thirds of all vacancies, even in large companies, have been filled by hiring from the outside, according to data from Taleo Corp., a talent-management company. That figure has dropped somewhat lately because of market conditions. But a generation ago, the number was close to 10%, as internal promotions and transfers were used to fill virtually all positions.

These days, many companies simply don't believe their own workers have the necessary skills to take on new roles. But, once again, many workers could step into those jobs with a bit of training.

And there's one on-the-job education strategy that doesn't cost companies a dime: Organize work so that employees are given projects that help them learn new skills. For example, a marketing manager may not know how to compute the return on marketing programs but might learn that skill while working on a team project with colleagues from the finance department.

Pursuing options like these vastly expands the supply of talent that employers can tap, making it both cheaper and easier to fill jobs. Of course, it's also much better for society. It helps build the supply of human capital in the economy, as well as opening the pathway for more people to get jobs.

It's an important instance where company self-interest and societal interest just happen to coincide.

Dr. Cappelli is the George W. Taylor professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Why would any company do this? The companies have INTENTIONALLY cultivated the idea of a shortage and lack of skills to get the indentured servants they want through visas and to pass the costs on to the taxpayer. They saw how well it worked for farmers. The companies know there is no shortage and employees from the US have all the skills that are needed already.

I call it the unemployable rate. When hiring in the 50K range employers are faced with potential employees who would rather go on welfare and collect food stamps and have virtually rent free section 8 housing. The work ethic in this salary range is dead. Obama has turned open minded business owners into defeatist and sometimes racist skeptics. All the freebees add up to a hopeless situation.

Contingency Staffing--- There's your Answer. Why would any company spend time in training, when they don't want to have any employees on their rolls? Push off the headache of HR & employee management onto some other organization that has NO idea of what your company ethics or work culture is.

Secondly, the computerized system that America worships has permeated other countries too. Don't like an employee or contract worker? Label them as 'unemployable', and the computer system will automatically spit out that label when the said 'unemployable' resume comes round again. Guess what, you will end up will a less suitable candidate who's probably not got capabilities... oh wait... you wanted a 'yes man'.

Ah.... the drug test... a particular company prepared to pay $10/hr wanted prospective employees to get a drug test & fax the results to them (cost of fax $5), which they said they would reimburse AFTER they receive the fax. The position didn't call for great skills and it didn't seem like the prospective employees would've had the spare cash to lay around too... All this for a 2 month contract!

"The real problem may be that many companies don't do training anymore or allow people any time to grow into a job."

The REAL problem is that companies are using such nonsense as an excuse to continue their all-out shift abroad. Funny how in Singapore the USA firms don't ask for such ridiculously high standards. They NEED and WANT to be here so they have more realistic, albeit high standards. Gupsup rubbish, I tell you. All nonsense and another excuse to pack up and leave (or higher slaves AKA foreign labor on work visas).

You'll whine but will the candidate stay?EVERYONE needs some sort of training, regardless of company and position.There's no one person that supposedly knows "everything" just like there's no one "perfect" job or employer.Give people the chance to work with a decent salary and respect them as a person and hopefully things will work out in a good way.

NO one candidate will possess "every" skill that the job posting says it needs from the candidate.

Yes, companies should just Stop wanting to find the "perfect" employee.Reverse it... it's basically saying that the average is looking for the "perfect" boss in a job.It ain't gonna happen! Get over it!

Gone are the days when people with experience can get a job. The hiring process is all about the employment "game" by using technology to screen people out, Not in, to the "right fit" of a position in a company. The candidate can also play the game and lie through the entire process. Only once that candidate starts working will both parties know if having that "job" is job or not.

The age glass ceiling has started years ago and now has dropped to those in the late 30s to early 40s. THOSE are the people with experience that companies "should" hire but won't because those people cost too much and already has their own mindset so it's supposedly harder to "train" them (if any type of training orientation is available nowadays!) to the company's culture.

Work relationships are relationships and both parties have to 50/50 in developing a relationship (just like any other relationships) but it won't happen since employers are the ones that always hold the upper hand.

When companies finally show some respect to the candidates and the people they hire, then they'll eventually have "loyal" employees instead of those that show up, work and wait for a paycheck.

There are reasons why there's no such thing as employee loyalty any more. The companies treat their employees like cr@p and that's what companies get in return from their employees.

Even the younger generation of workers (i.e. tech and medical employees) should realize that a couple of years from now, they will be treated the same way. But it's understandable about their arrogance and lack of empathy as they don't have much life or work experience yet compared to those in their 30s-50s. Those younger worker will realize someday that they'll get treated the same way that older workers are treated. Any wonder why older workers/people don't give them any sympathy?

1) Get HR out of the hiring business. 2) Make sure the acounting or finance department has NO SAY whatsoever. 3) Let department heads make their own choices and be given a reasonable budget for hiring (This will typically be about 50% over what the accounting department recommends).

Obvious advice of the day. Pay enough and they'll find YOU. In other obvious news, technology has grown disparate and complex. You will NEVER find a candidate who has EVERY skill on the list who you can drop into a seat and walk away. YOU WILL HAVE TO DO SOME TRAINING. It may not be much, but your first 4 to 12 weeks are going to include the basics of one or two critical domain skills. It has to happen. Get over it.

I started working as a skilled, trained computer programmer on Wall Street thirty years ago. It was so hard to get competent programmers at the time that we recruited college grads with no programming background and put them through six week intensive programming courses. I taught a number of these classes for the company myself. Go forward twenty years and the company, as did so many others, began outsourcing the programming jobs to India and the Phillipines. We stopped hiring bright college grads and training them ourselves. You had to have at least five years experience as a programmer before you were even considered for an entry-level job. Then the stateside hiring ceased completely. Those programming jobs that weren't shipped to Asia were now being filled by contract workers - temps, come aboard, work on a specific project and then move on. No corporate knowledge, no corporate history.Training today? Are you kidding? Non-existent.

Is it possible that, under current competitive pressures, companies cannot afford the time to train new employees? I worked for a firm which exclusively did engineering, and we generally hired MS level with experience. The rule of thumb was that it would take at least a full year before the new hire was productive. Prior to that, they were a net negative, draining time and talent from our mission tasks to train and develop them. Again, these were engineers with a Masters' and 3-5 years of professional experience. How many companies today can afford to make that great an investment in an employee who may turn out to be below average (half of 'em will) or who may leave after 2-3 years?

One of the first places that I've seen employers fall on their faces is in their HR departments, where they often have staff right out of school -- 20-somethings on their very first job -- trying to figure out how to hire personnel who probably wouldn't hire them to lead a bunch of kindergarden students across a quiet intersection.

Businesses show their contempt right out of the gate -- no wonder they can't find proper employees. Who would want to work there?

The real translation is that companies do not want to pay for the education and experience they require of applicants. It's called supply and demand. If the price offered (wages/salary) is insufficient there will be an insufficient pool of qualified persons.

I also agree with the posts regarding the phenomenon of many companies not willing to train new hires.

It's all part of the short-term mentality that now seems to pervade corporate America.

It's not been my experience that no one does training. I worked for Hearst which does lots of training and heard co-workers complain that the company doesn't do ENOUGH training. There is so much information online for freakin' FREE, if you aren't trained, it's your own fault. I swear some people would starve to death at a free all-you-can-eat buffet.

Based on my own experience, I believe that Dr. Cappelli is correct. Not even having an MBA from Wharton makes a person immune from such market dynamics. I have found that applying for jobs the conventional way is often the slowest way to actually get a job because of all the barriers that HR folks erect. Often it is much faster to "do an end run around the HR department" and approach the hiring manager directly. The more senior hiring manager often turns out to be more reasonable in their expectations of a candidate than the HR department is. In Canada, many companies want to know what salary the candidiate will accept before HR will decide whether to grant an interview...then it becomes a guessing game as to what is the salary band that the company is working with as they usually will not share this info up front. The whole "dance" is counterproductive to building a strong relationship.

Don't forget the unicorn factor. Companies look for candidates with ridiculous skill combinations that don't exist. It's wishful thinking run amok. Specific example. In my industry, marketing, you see job postings that seek a hybrid copywriter, journalist, designer, proofreader, production manager. These are all discrete positions that require specific skill sets and years of experience to achieve proficiency. If you find someone who professes to possess this strange combination of aptitudes, they're most certainly a "hack of all trades." Companies get what they pay for.

My gay and lesbian studies, african american studies, english as a second language, and all my academic awards for trying hard, my D grades revised up after my mother made the 4000th excuse for me, the drug tests that were deemed false because they specimens got mixed up, all demonstrate that I am highly qualified for something. Which end of the pencil do I hold again?

Schools used to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Now we teach how to get and stay on assistance.

I saw an ad on Craigslist in SF Bay Area (a high wage region) for a nursing home aide. The person would be changing sheets, assisting very old people with their daily routine, etc etc. The job required unlimited flexibilty in hours - 24/7, weekends, holidays, etc, bilingual skills in English and Spanish to talk to both patients and fellow workers, and offered no benefits - only "co-investments" in 401-K and "opportunity" to join the company health plan. The pay? $11.00 per hour and no overtime for nights, weekends, etc. That's attractive.

This is so true. When I got my first professional job at a NY bank in the early 1980s, my entering "class" had all sorts of backgrounds, e.g. ex-Navy pilot; ballet dancer; tabloid journalist; big animal vet; anthropologist; archaeologist; fifth grade teacher and degrees, MBA, J.D., MFA, undergrad degrees in philosophy, chemistry, meteorology,etc. Most did well at the bank or in other financial service fields, mastering everything from aircraft leasing, to merchant banking, to mid-market commercial lending, to consumer banking. All you needed was a reasonably good education, a nice business wardrobe, good social skills / etiquette and the desire to work hard.

But over the years, I noticed that more and more of the open jobs required very specific skills and background, shutting out a lot of the generalists who could move from one area to another with just a little training. Hiring went more to the outside, with fewer promoted from within.

When I left a few years ago, pretty much every job was hyper specialized. The result: fewer and fewer managers had anything more than a narrow few of what the enterprise did and how it made money.

A company hired a middle age man (45) in 1995 to work part time as a weekend customer service representative earning $6.91 an hour. Within six years he was reporting three down from the CEO in a company with over 176,000 employees designing, engineering, and deploying a corporate training LMS, e-learning content, technical training classrooms, servers, and networks. In an imperfect world there are opportunities all around you.

" Of course, it's also much better for society. It helps build the supply of human capital in the economy, as well as opening the pathway for more people to get jobs."

If anyone thinks American businesses care one bit about this, they are CRAZY! Their ONLY concern is getting the most for their money--PERIOD. So, the whole process is really up to the employee, or prospective employee. Don't count on businesses to anything other than what come to them naturally.

"But I'm also convinced that some of the problem we're up against is simply a failure of imagination. "

This is perhaps the key statement in this whole article. I used to work for a completely "Made in the USA" style company run by a 90 year old German immigrant who wanted everything made in the US. That required ALOT of imagination, but we did it. On one occasion, the company was having trouble getting parts made from nickle--his solution--"We're buying a nickle mine!" And we did.

Having worked for years in engineering for a company that manufactures its products in China, I propose an explanation for the following statement in the article:

"Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can't get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered."

Even if a job is being offered here in the US, a company that is used to getting goods and services in China will always view the amount of money they may have to offer a US employee as too much. They know that they can't outsource the job, but because a similar position in China pays far less, there is a downward influence on the salary offered.

"The result: European countries aren't having skill-shortage complaints at the same level as in the U.S., and the nations that have the most established apprenticeship programs--where unemployment is low"

Then, he states:

"We aren't going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide."

Why can't the US do the same? Is it because the Europeans have done it and we can't admit that maybe somebody else knows something that we Americans don't?

As an IT manager I wish I could get rid of HR and the companies that "help" it. They reject perfectly fine people and send me people the know how to game the online application process. They do not understand the job opening, or the fact that I am looking for an entry level person to teach them the way we do business.

Every time I read an opinion expressed by these elite business school class room professors, I just could not comprehend the fact how much these nut cases are so much out of their depth and out of touch with real world! Thank goodness we should just let these book worms to stay with their chalk piece, black board and mandatory publication requirements and stay out of the real world!

I worked at a "Contingency Staffing" agency here in India for a while & it boggled the mind how many Indians with questionable skills were being hired over American citizens. And that is the whole point, why would you invest in training a loyal employee, when its easier to finish up a contract & send people on their merry way, no other HR issues at stake either.

My point exactly! All an excuse to move the position(s) abroad. I know. That happened to my husband the time he was laid off. His old company moved the entire IT section abroad with the excuse that they increasingly could not "find the right people." All rubbish. They could easily find the right people but didn't want to pay a decent wage.

If you are wondering if the company knows this is hurting USA, they don't give a Christie's behind. The upper management believed that their future was in Asia so who cared? No one! Now we live in Singapore and guess what, there are jobs galore and in fact a shortage. Wages are not low here but Asia is where these (former) USA companies want to be so all is well in paying a decent wage. In fact my husband has a higher wage here than his last job in USA.

Not all people with a Masters Degree know everything.. look at people with MBAs! Do you think having an MBA "justifies" a person to do well? No, it just means that you're educated in the business field.

Read the comments... Companies expect to find the "perfect" employee. There's NO such thing! Get over it!

With your comment, who'd want to work for you or your company?

The catch-22 in business: companies want experienced people to work for them but they won't hire people because many are "inexperienced". But how do people get experience? By WORKING!

Treat the employees as people and let them grow; in return, the employee may be loyal to the company.Treat the employees like trash and trash is what you'll get from the employees.

I worked at a contingency staffing agency here in India, calling the US. Guess what? After a month, I learned that ALMOST all contingency staffing agencies are owned by ASIANS or some All-American orgs had their back office processing units set up here.... And the most employable of the CVs that we sent across were rejected coz they asked for 'too much'

As you say, there are quite a number who'd starve at an all you can eat buffet but at the lower levels training helps in cross-training employees to move sideways in verticals & reduce the cost of full cycle recruitment

I realize that yours is an old quote, but I still have to respond. The 'unicorn factor', as you so ably describe it, looking for ridiculous skill combinations that don't exist in the real world, is a trick that HR departments and companies use when they have already decided on a candidate, usually somebody's relative, wife, or girlfriend/boyfriend, but have to go through the charade of posting the job and looking for candidates. Since no one fits the bill, they are free to hire 'the next best thing', which may well turn out to be the CEO's wife's cousin, who really needs that job since he got out of rehab.

Data mining algorithms often come across what is known as "the curse of dimensionality" that affects all sorts of pattern recognition and similarity search problems.

For instance, in drug design, when a bioinformatics algorithm is sifting through vast databases of molecular structures and looking for molecules that are similar to a "known active" drug (to synthesize the molecules found in the search and get patents), when just two criteria (or dimensions) are used (similarity in molecular weight and aromatic bonds, for example) about 22% of the database molecules won't fit. With five criteria, 80% won't fit and so on. In hifalutin terminolgy, "the higher the dimensionality, the smaller the fraction of the hyperbox that is covered by the embedded hypersphere!"

A sailor on shore leave looking for "someone to meet" has only one criterion in mind and is very likely to score. A single person sitting in Cambridge, MA and has a PhD, a MacArthur award, can play the piano and the erhu, can speak 20 languages, runs the marathon, etc. and is looking for a mate with similar attributes and accomplishments-- is going to be waiting for a long time!

That brings us to your point. In the old days, hiring was done by people with experience in the line of work in question, who went by a few solid criteria: grades, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and yes, the school the candidate attended. Now instead you've got these HR zombies sitting around with zillion metrics and criteria. No wonder they can't find people!

My husband speaks English as a second language, which he learned to read and write when he was ten. Same for my grandmothers. He spoke Lithuanian first, they spoke Italian, and all three can wipe the floor with 99 percent of the native English speakers I meet in New York City. The same can be said of my neighbors and the guys running the three bodegas who greet us by name, and then turn to their business partners and launch into conversations in equally fluent Spanish, their first language. There is also the Hindi-speaking coffee-shop owner near my office, and I could go on. There are plenty of myths about ESL people, but lack of competency in English is one that should be put to rest.

That said, if one is bothered by a large percentage of ESL candidates in the workforce, there are plenty of small-to-midsized cities, such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland, which are lacking in in-migration or population mobility, and they usually feature a workforce that skews heavily toward white, native English speakers, many of whom did not major in gay and lesbian studies or ESL because they did not go to college. Of course, jobs are more difficult to come by in those labor markets, but we all must decide what we will and won't sacrifice to find our fit.

Amazing. A few months back, I overheard an early morning discussion, which I soon determined to be a job interview of a college student by a young professional prospective employer. It was an extremely detailed interview covering what extracurricular activities and volunteer work the undergrad had undertaken and what he had gained from those experiences. This interview happened in the financial district of lower Manhattan. But the reason I was able to overhear it was because it was taking place at the adjoining table to mine at a local Starbucks.

I left for my own appointment, but in complete wonderment of the depth to which the American workplace, the new hollow promise of prosperity, had descended.

Europe has many fine traditions - beer during lunch, champagne case in office, 4 weeks mandatory vacation and overtime adds up some more and oh yes social security, welfare and lifetime universal medical care - and good quality at that. ( I really am a sucker for their pealing bells and age-old organs)

Which aspect or which country in Europe would be emulated, France, or Spain or Greece or Poland or...? They sure don't have a reported skills shortage anyway today, and as far as I can remember they Spain, Greece, Poland never had; so much for the vaunted European example.

If it is Germany you had in mind as this don does, that country is rather different, they take pride in their engineering and labor sits on the Board and they DO have teeth and they have been exporting away to all their delighted customers across the world. It is not for nothing that that country has BMW, AUDI, Mercedes, PORSCHE and VW while US has GM, Chrysler and Ford...

Germany also classifies their stock of kids - and from an early age on (10) - those destined for Gymansiums ( read higher education) are sorted out from the next rung of students - those who get vocational training - I guess the rest of the class is left to live on welfare or swabbing floors and glazing windows because as kids they were "slow". Would USA be open to accepting that? Does not sound too good to me. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4736910.stm

Would US corporate culture accommodate that 4 weeks holiday, labor on the Board, do away with, by most hearsay accounts, capricious RIFs? I think that those too matter, for corporate ed to be useful and serious.

Another thing - getting useful skills at a workplace is not something that can be done by passionately discussing college football or sitting room decor and paint schemes, travel plans, dogs, cats, though I suppose that is supposed to humanize you. (There was also some sort of scrabble on Iphones in vogue.)

I generalize perhaps, but at least with the millennials (and rather nicely paid, I may add) that I have seen and managed that was the case, which puzzles me.

It is all about work life balance, whatever that is - (I usually have loved what I did and got my kicks from working at stuff I liked, even while looking out for the next thing to get into, I must be odd..) - human int, adoption of causes (breast cancer) etc that grabs the limelight - but unfortunately that works against acquiring portable skills. It comes as a genuine surprise to them that it was up to them to learn on the job with a little bit of ongoing mentor-ship and structured coaching at the department level in place.

I imagine it is the tinsel stars, smiley stickers, certificates etc. glad-handed around in schools which merely require a warm body who shows up.

Workplaces tend to be different, though, as in an organization that I once (thankfully) belonged to, the bar gets lowered and others in the team who could, took up the slack, just because... they could not do otherwise.

You should subscribe to Nick Corcodilios's newsletter at the Ask the Headhunter website. He has been recruiting in Silicon Valley, with an IT focus of course, for decades. He has a lot of ideas for managers to get around HR, who he calls "personnel jockeys," and with good reason. I've used many of his tips for years (as both a job-seeker and as a manager), and I've only made one bad hire. Unsurprisingly, that bad hire came from when I turned to the job boards, a big no-no in Nick's book. The hiring system is fundamentally broken, but look to Nick, and he'll help you get around it. He is a completely brilliant headhunter.

Don't blame HR. They are merely using the parameters set for them by the department heads. Truth be told, the companies more often than naught do not want to find the right person. They use this as an excuse to hire a slave (foreigner on a work visa) or to pack up and move the position abroad. That's all.

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